Crimean War

For centuries the Christian communities of Ottoman Palestine had contested the custody of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and the contest was minutely physical: which clergy held which keys, who might repair which roof, who processed at which hour, and where a silver star bearing a Latin inscription lay in the grotto at Bethlehem. That star disappeared in 1847, and the argument over its replacement became the immediate occasion of a European war.

Behind the clergy stood two treaties and two empires. France claimed a protectorate over Latin Christians from the capitulations granted by the sultans, most influentially those of 1740; Russia claimed a standing in Ottoman Orthodox affairs which it read into the treaty of Kuchuk Kaynarca of 1774. Napoleon III, needing Catholic support at home, pressed the Latin claims from 1850, and in 1852 the sultan issued a firman conceding several of them. Nicholas I, who understood himself as the protector of Orthodoxy and the heir of a Christian empire lost in 1453, sent Prince Menshikov to Constantinople in 1853 to demand not only the reversal of that concession but a treaty right of protection over some twelve million Orthodox subjects of the sultan.

Orlando Figes has argued that the war cannot be understood without taking that religious language seriously rather than treating it as a pretext for a quarrel about the straits. The Porte refused, Russia occupied the Danubian principalities, and by March 1854 Britain and France were at war with Russia.

Each belligerent preached its own version of a holy war. Russian manifestos called the campaign a defence of the faith and revived the old hope of a cross above Hagia Sophia; Ottoman proclamations summoned the sultan's Muslim subjects to the defence of the caliph's realm; and French Catholic opinion treated the expedition as a vindication of the Latin rite. The awkwardness fell on Britain and France, whose armies fought to preserve a Muslim empire against a Christian one, a reversal that Anglican and Catholic commentators alike found difficult to explain to their congregations, and which anti-war critics in both countries made much of.

The war was also the first to be reported by telegraph and photographed in the field, and the reporting produced its own religious icon in Florence Nightingale, whose sense of a divine calling shaped a nursing service at Scutari that Christian and secular writers have claimed ever since.

The settlement moved in the opposite direction from the rhetoric. The Treaty of Paris of 1856 neutralised the Black Sea and, instead of a Russian protectorate, obtained from the sultan the reform edict of that year, which promised equality before the law to the empire's non-Muslim subjects. The holy places themselves were frozen: the arrangement of 1852, confirmed after the war, hardened into the Status Quo, the rule that nothing in the shared churches may be altered without the consent of all the communities, which is why a ladder has stood on a ledge of the Holy Sepulchre for well over a century.